Friday, March 23, 2007

So was Porkoo thinking and planning his one piece escape from the middle of the vasluians. He pretended he was cold, wrapping his blue-white scarf around his neck under his coat and went on eating his seeds. Terrorized by the fact that a single smile might reveal him, he showed a serious, immovable face, and even looked away when important game moments took place. For Porkoo's misfortune to be complete, Poli had all the chances to score you can imagine but they didn't. At one of them, when Porkoo was looking away so that he wouldn't be tempted to cheer, a sunflower seed fan behind him remarked: "Hey, smartie, have you grown a face on the wrong side of your body?" Oh no, Porkoo, don't let them become suspicious! If it wouldn't be a serious face he has to show, he would even cry looking at the Poli horde on the other side of the stadium, all happy that their favorites are "on them, on their mother!" (also a Romanian hooligan saying).

But look, another chance for Iasi to score, it's the 88th minute and Balba is going inside the square with the ball, he's gonna scooooore... but, no, he's illegally stopped by one of the vasluians... Penalty shot!!!!! yeeey!... but Balba is hit pretty bad... the ambulance takes him straight to the hospital! You bloody vasluian bastards, you hit our star!!!! DAMN IT, DAMN IT, I cannot hold it anymore, damn it! Onut shoots the penalty kick and he scores!!! We wooon, we wooon!

"Yeeeey!!!! GO POOOOLIIII!!! YEEEEEEYYY!!!"yy... Oups...

Again, his seat companions weren't as happy as him... The big sunflower seeds fans behind him - remember them, don't you? -, after a short grief, look at Porkoo as if they want to send him to accompany his idol, Balba.

"Sorry guys, I meant BUUUUU... a-a-accc-tually I said BUUU, you must have misheard it... i-i-t was the echo from the other ss-s-s-i-d-d-d-de..." He didn't get to finish his new sonic theory: one of the guys slapped him really hard on the back of his head. The birds are singing again, it's spring time. While all the others were leaving the stadium and the big guys were in the middle of a lesson on "Sound trajectory through punches and feet - with practical examples", a tall blonde girl with a perfect 90-60-90 body, big boobs and golden hair stops in front of their seats and shouts: "Hey, brother, where were you? I've been looking for you all evening, damn it!" It was the beautiful sister of one of the big guys and normally Porkoo would be fascinated but now he's only enjoying some punchless moments! The girl comes to them and his brother explains to her what happened, ending with: "Well, that's it! Love hurts: you must suffer for your team else is not true love! Ha-ha-ha".

She looks at Porkoo who tried hardly to stand and walk, with his Poli scarf all dirty now and with blood on his face. "C'mon, guys, you were mean... Look at him!" she says and then she gets her perfumed napkin out of her yellow-green purse and delicately wipes his face. OOOOOHHHH MMMMYYY GOOOD, maaaaan, punch me again, please! thinks Porkoo. She bends to his ear and whispers: "Hey, how about a 'game' between you and me tonight?" OOOhhh mmmmyyyy Goood! "well... let me think first... ... YEEEES!". So they leave the stadium, arm to arm, all giggling and making fun of some people's exaggerated passion for the favorite team.

Because she is the daughter of a wealthy Vaslui business-man, she has a room rented at a luxury hotel in Iasi. They get inside the room all hot and kissing, they tear their clothes off (even her yellow-green bra), but suddenly "AAAAHHH, my god, my back aches, I can't move... It must be your brother's feet! Oh, God, it hurts so bad!". "Oh, Porkoo, I'm sorry for this!" "Well, it's not your fault, let's continue" says hot Porkoo. But "Ahh, damn it, I can't!! It hurts! It hurts!". "It's no problem, Porkoo! We'll only sleep in each other's arms... I'm happy just to hold you!" said the girl cuddling in his arms.

They spent a few more hours chatting and then went asleep with Porkoo's mind focused on a single thought: next time, he will support the right team!

Documenting for the bsc and in actually no mood of doing it (yes, Buraga WILL kill me!), I stumbled upon an article on Metacrap. You might find it resembling to my article on tags here-and-there. And I know, you already knew all that stuff, it's obvious, isn't it?

Anyway, it made me ask myself: does web converge asimptotically to 3.0? That is, are we going there but will never actually GET there? Either way, for its beauty it is worth...

Well, spring has come (actually there was no winter) and a young bird singing on a campus window frame reminded Porkoo (that full of Counter and Brood Porkoo) of it: one morning he turned his head away from his computer and realized that the weather outside is gorgeous and that, probably, at this time of the year, the girls abandoned their heavy winter clothes and are now walking in the sun wearing only transparent shirts, waiting for his eyes to caress their bodies. He turned back to his monitor longing for what he has missed by sitting in the house so long... And there, on the opened gsp page was his salvation: "Poli Iasi vs. F.C. Vaslui, tonight, on "Emil Alexandrescu" stadium in Iasi"!!! Not so many girls, actually, but what does it matter? It's fresh spring air, THE football game, and he MUST be there to support his white-blue love: POLI!

Now I must interfere and mention, for the football noobs, that there is a big rivalry between the two teams, and that many vasluians live in Iasi for a reason or another (students, most of them). The distance between the two towns is of 60-70 km so imagine a stadium filled with football fans: half white-blue, half yellow-green.

Said and done: at 19h he is in front of the stadium armed with entertaining tools like: sunflower seeds (great popcorn replacer) and two Beck's beer cans, one in each of his jacket pockets. To prove his love, he immediately buys a POLI scarf and wears it proudly on top of his coat, for every vasluian looser to know he's there for POOOOOLI! Even that group of skinhead vasluians over there, to whom he shouts loudly, so that the entire Copou hill can hear his manifesto: "Is not Vaslui!!!!!" (that, in Romanian, sounds like "Vaslui sucks" and is very common among supporters). One of them comes towards him prepared to show him who is not, but the others stop him with "Leave him alone, man, can't you see he's stupid?"s. "F***ing bald coward!" thinks Porkoo and walks on, to inform other people of his passion, too.

At the entrance in the stadium, the bodyguards give him a light body check and, touching his jacket pockets, they remark: "So you're here for big fun tonight... ;). These remain with us, though!". "Oh, no! Bloody bribees! I have a ticket! They pretend bribe to get on the stadium with a ticket too, damn! Is not Dinamo!!!!" (Dinamo is the police force's football team). But you cannot stand against the police, can you?

Well, finally he finds an empty seat, with no beer but still decided to enjoy the game: he's there for the team after all, beer he can have anywhere. The seat is not so well placed (on the corner of the stadium) but, hey, he's there for the atmosphere, not the game itself, game he can have on TV. His seat is pretty dirty (big (and i mean physically big) sunflower seeds fans behind him) but, hey, POLI is gonna score so much, and he's gonna cheer so much, that he won't have time to actually sit. The teams get in the court: YEEEEEEEEEEEY! GO POOOLI!!! (thinks Porkoo) but just when he is about to open his mouth to let his love come out, he realizes that no one around him is as happy as him... au contraire... They're no real fans! What are they doing on the stadium, then? Look at that fat guy, two seats farther, with his yellow shirt with green collar: no real passion in his eyes... and his that tall skinny one on my left with yellow-green scarf... and that guy near me with his yellow trousers and green coat.. and the otherrrr with yyyyyyeeeelllloooowwww-ggggrrrreeee...FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!! My f***ing perfect luck! f**************!!!!!! f**k, f**k, f**k!!!! damn it, damn it! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! damn iiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOoooooo..... :(((

TO BE CONTINUED...

What will happen next? Will Porkoo come out one piece from the middle of the Vaslui fans horde? stay tuned!

Monday, March 19, 2007

I mean, it's the bloody future of the web, and they just ignore it: either don't tag stuff or they tag it with the slow, non-functional part of their brains.When I found out about upcoming.org using hCalendars, I thought: oh goodie, gold mine: semantically marked events, free test data for my bsc!!!BUT (the omnipresent 'but'), when I really started scraping it, I found out that figuring out semantics it's haaaard and misinterpreting standards (or recommendations, not to be so harsh) might be a hobby for some: gorgious abbr-locations, with void titles: I mean title="". Then why the f did you put that location class there in the first place?And, to get back to the tags (which is the reason of this post)... take a look at the Sun mashup event today... Interesting, is it? BUT how am I suppose to discover it if it isn't tagged at all??? And this is not some mistake of an author, it's a habit (lots of events don't have tags at all). I wonder, is it because upcoming DOES NOT have a field for tags in the 'add event' form? Hmmm... or because the 'add tag' button is pretty hidden on the event page? (it took me a while to find it. I admit, when I analyzed the tags of the events I was looking at the markup).

So which people are we talking about ignoring tagging? We might be talking as well about the developers: it's them who should realize the importance of tags and make it easier for users to produce tagged content. But since upcoming is 'a Yahoo company', I'm not surprised: it's not their first and personally, I'm expecting more...

If some developers don't realize the importance of semantic markup, maybe users do, and maybe it's us who should start the 'web revolution': your favourite events site does not provide tagging? Report it to the developers, send an email, make a request, state your wish for a better world! The website you upload your pictures to does not tag them? Change it! there are a lot of sites that do! Flood the upcoming mailbox with your requests to a decent tagging process so that next time you would be able to find out about the Sun mashup event...

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Because I know you haven't got a damn clue about who Porkoo is...Previous, on Porkoo: he is a young pig from a small town near Iasi and, as he just finished highschool, he comes to study in Iasi. He knows (he has heard from his older friends) that Iasi is a big city, with good universities, cool discos and possibilities of having fun as well as getting culturalized. Porkoo is pretty smart, with good marks in highschool (actually his colleagues often called him 'geek') but no big plans with his life: he's not really decided what he wants to study. So he decides to go up on the Copou hill (where his parents told him he could find the most studentish atmosphere and the greatest university of Iasi) and check on the faculties to see whichever he likes best (armed, of course, with strict and relevant criteria like: how good does it look, how amiable is the personnel, how far does he have to go for classes, and so on). His wanderings brought him, tired and bored, about midday, in front of the C building... There, he checked on the building: not the coolest he had seen, the personnel: pretty cool (checked!), how far the classroooms aaaaaarrrr... BBBUT, WHAT'S THAT??? A veeeery, veeeeery beautiful blonde girl has just come out of the building. Another two, equally beautiful, follow her. They giggle about something and light up their slim cigarettes talking loud and joyful about economy or smth, it doesn't matter anyway. The July sun is playing in their shiny hair and the mild wind spoils their delicate skin with its dance (enough bla-bla). Porkoo is enchanted: he cannot take his eyes away while his mind is far away into elaborating plans (from the smug 'hey, missy, lonely-lonely?' category) of how to get such a 'piece' for himself. Remember when I said that Porkoo hasn't got any big plans? Well, he kind of has one: he wants to get laid, he has seen it on TV, it seems cool; his friends also dropped some hints about being 'cool, man!' and sometimes, when he reads 'Sports Gazette' online and sees the beautiful girls, he feels some sort of strange feeling, like a sudden powerful desire, he dreams of hot nights and lazy mornings with such a lady. After the girls' cigarettes finished and they went inside, and after ten more minutes of staring at the wall against which they stood, Porkoo's brain finally comes up with an idea: they are, most probable, attending the faculty in this building so if he would join this faculty... He rushes inside looking for an office. Oh, there, on the left. In five minutes he was out, dreaming of a new life, proud of his new badge saying: